Monday, April 27, 2015

The Amazon EC2 instance does not come with the swap partition by default. You will need to add the swap or paging space manually.

Swap space are useful for systems having less memory (RAM). If your system facing problem of lack of memory continuously and you don’t want to increase memory on server, Then it can be helpful to enable swap in your system. Swap is comparatively much slower than physical memory but operating system uses swap space in case system goes out of memory. To know more about working of swap visit here.

Swappiness is a ratio of how often the system will write to the swapfile: if set to zero, the system will only swap to avoid running out of memory (the error above); if set to 100, the system will attempt to swap all the time. The default is set at 60. Since we want to utilize the swap only when necessary.

The Linux kernel provides a tweakable setting that controls how often the swap file is used, called swappiness.

A swappiness setting of zero means that the disk will be avoided unless absolutely necessary (you run out of memory), while a swappiness setting of 100 means that programs will be swapped to disk almost instantly.

Ubuntu system comes with a default of 60, meaning that the swap file will be used fairly often if the memory usage is around half of my RAM.

# cat /proc/sys/vm/swappiness

30

To configure swappiness:

# sh -c "echo vm.swappiness = 0 >> /etc/sysctl.conf && sysctl -p"

Add the swap space to a second disk instead of the current disk:

If you would like to add the swap space to a second disk, first we need to add extra disk in our system first. In my case new disk mounted as /dev/xvdd (It may change in your case). Then, run the following commands:

# mkswap -f /dev/xvdd
# swapon /dev/xvdd

# vim /etc/fstab

dev/xvdd swap swap defaults 0 0

If at all possible, I'd advise not to use swap on EC2 unless you're 99% certain you won't have to use it (I.E. it's only there for emergency). When we disabled swap on some of our EC2 instances our monthly EBS IO costs probably halved.

You are right, the Ubuntu EC2 EBS images don't come with swap space configured (for 11.04 at least). The "regular" instance-type images do have a swap partition, albeit only 896 MB on the one I tested.

If some process blows up and you don't have swap space, your server could come to a crawling halt for a good while before the OOM killer kicks in, whereas with swap, it merely gets slow. For that reason, I always like to have swap space around, even with enough RAM. Here's your options:

Create an EBS volume (2-4 times the size of your RAM), attach it to your instance (I like calling it /dev/xvdm for "memory"), sudo mkswap /dev/xvdm, add it to fstab, sudo swapon -a, and you're good to go. I have done this before and it works fine, and it is probably a bit faster than using a swap file, but for a server that doesn't normally depend on swap performance, I personally think the minor performance improvement is not worth the added complexity of having to attach a volume. (Update: It's probably not faster than a swap file on instance storage, since EBS has become known for lousy and unpredictable performance.)

Or you might be able to repartition your disk to add a swap partition, though this might require creating a new AMI. I have not been able to do this in a running instance, because I cannot unmount the root file system, and I do not even have access to the disk device (/dev/xvda), only the partition (xvda1).

Or you can create a swap file. This is my preferred solution right now.